Wherein The Subtle Rudder considers religion.

I took the Belief-O-Matic religion quiz this morning, and it pretty much nailed me (to a Kum-Ba-Yah cross). Here are the faiths that most closely match my beliefs:

1. Secular Humanism (100%)
2. Unitarian Universalism (98%)
3. Liberal Quakers (92%)
4. Neo-Pagan (88%)
5. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (79%)
6. New Age (78%)
7. Theravada Buddhism (68%)
8. Mahayana Buddhism (65%)
9. Taoism (62%)
10. Nontheist (60%)

This is a long post; eternal even. Settle in with some tea and snacks, and let’s get the holy rolling, okay?

1. Secular Humanists (100%)
Well, yeah, these are my people. I remember during the culture wars of the past decades, when the more fundamentally motivated among us would invoke Secular Humanists with the same seethe and scorn they’d use to say Nazis or Scientologists or Abortion-Hungry Sluts. But hey, It’s All Good. That’s our motto, we secular humanists. Our tenets are: Live & Let Live; Do Unto Others; and Mean People Suck.

2. Unitarian Universalism (98%)
If I weren’t such a hermit, I’d probably join the Unitarians, just for the fellowship, and also for something to do in the evening that doesn’t involve drinking wine and watching DVDs alone. Unfortunately, I get the giggles when I think of them, and not for any good reason. A long-ago friend told the story of an ill-fated acid trip he’d taken during high school. He was at catholic school, and man, did those Pius kids party. Me, I was away every weekend doing dramatic interpretations of Eugene O’Neill in speech contests across the middle west. I did dork, not drugs.

Apparently, the group of friends dropped acid by their lockers, then ended up in the Unitarian Church parking lot not far from their school. They had a good scare when a group of unitarians—fresh from an earnest discussion of hunger or apartheid over thin mints and decaf, no doubt—emerged from their building and caught the trippers off guard. “Oh my god!” whispered my friend. “IT’S THE UNIS!” In my crowd, “Uni” became shorthand for anything weird or startling or freaky. So now, when I think of joining up to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, I hear the word “Uni” in my head, then pour myself some wine and press play.

3. Liberal Quakers (92%)
I could hang with being a Quaker, but I’m afraid I have a stronger ass-kicking gene than would be strictly appreciated. I wish I had it in me to be a pacifist, but in my secret heart I’m really Sydney Bristow; just one fetching wig and a high kick away from taking out the bad guys. The Quakers would tolerate me—that’s their gig, right?—but they’d keep me out of the Jello Salad serving line, lest my inner warrior leak out on the youngsters.

4. Neo-Pagan (88%)
Neo-pagans bug me; too much time in San Francisco, I guess, where I learned to hate on the hippies, the tribalists, the many tiresome out-there adherents. I’ve stayed away from Burning Man, because I know I would have to be in just the right mood; ugh, I can just see me, PMSing on the Playa. Nightmare! Plus, I can’t reconcile costumes with camping. They just don’t go together in my head.

Last time I spent much time with any pagans was at a dance club a few years back. Everyone was all inked-up, with various dread-full dos, and I was getting a LOT of attention from this good-looking tribal dude; very Playa Player. I told my friend he was cute in the bathroom, and she told me to be careful, that he couldn’t give me what I was looking for. He was a Polyammer, she said, then she had to explain what this meant, because I was still huffing the dork, many years past high school. A Polyammer, or person of polyamorous instincts, is a little like a Uni, only you get to sleep with lots more people. As much as I love my favorite southern gothic pervert, I am afflicted with monogamy, not comfortable with sharing.

5. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (79%)
Although I’ve been a heathen on the coast most of my adult life, we went to whichever milktoast EZ-Jesus church had nice windows and a really excellent choir growing up. This meant Westminster Presbyterian when I was in early grade school, then First Plymouth Congregational Church after that (which is really just Unis with candle-lighters and choir robes). I also did a fair amount of time in the Missouri Synod Lutheran tradition when I stayed at my grandparent’s ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills. (God was stricter there, and asses were tighter.)

In the summer, I attended Vacation Bible School, or VBS, at my aunt’s praise-heavy church, something vague and evangelical in a boxy, unglorious building. Vast doctrinal gulfs raised no questions; it was all just church to me, washing over me in a big, boring, Jesusy wave. I did not have the lord in me, although I was drawn to those who burned with spirit. But then again, I also romanticized madness for a lot longer than was strictly healthy.

Back home, while mom sang in the choir and dad sat through the sermon, I’d skip out of sunday school and slink around the church library, picking my way through The Screwtape Letters or reading Joni or Go Ask Alice for the umpteenth time. When I got old enough, my parents made me attend the service; more to keep an eye on me, I suppose, than to teach me any particular godly lessons.

Sometimes I imagined I could throw my soul, my consciousness, like you can throw your voice—a sort of spiritual ventriloquy—and I remember watching myself from the rafters, trapped in the pew by grown-up bodies in serious clothes, further tethered by my waist-strangling pantyhose (suntan-colored, control top), and blinking mulishly in the Sunday sun, which had a wistful amber quality that will forever equal church to me.

Maybe that’s why christ didn’t take with me, why I’m not a believer; the day of prayer comes at the ass end of the week, when my mood is always colored by Tomorrow’s Monday melancholy. As an adult, I combat that trough with what I call the Church of the New York Times (which makes Frank Rich the Apostle Paul, I suppose).

Like the Missouri Synod Lutherans, there’s a specific order to our service. We begin with an intercessory: the Styles section, then the Arts and Letters prayer, a call and response through the magazine, and then the Week in Review, our sermon. Once we’ve gotten through this core service, complete with many offerings of tea and the poached eggs of christ, we are free to ignore sports and business, skitter through the hard news, and admire all the places we can’t afford to go just now. The book section gets read on successive mornings throughout the week. It’s a way to bring a little worship into every day.

6. New Age (78%)
When I used to work with the AIDS Memorial Quilt, my then-boyfriend and I took a weekend trip to a gathering of transpersonal psychologists down at a lovely conference center on the pacific coast. We took two 12-by-12s—the basic display unit of the quilt, each made up of 6 individual panels—and I was scheduled to give a talk about loss and memory, about how the quilt was an act of communal art and shared remembering.

The keynote was David Whyte, a welsh poet who talked about poetry as an essential life force, and he was fantastic, speaking every poem out loud twice, so you could really begin to hear it sing. He spoke in the big receiving room, flanked by panels from the quilt hanging from the balcony above, and during his talk he spoke quite movingly about what it meant to stand in front of these memorials—loss made visible—and everyone in the audience sucked in their breath and nodded sadly, sagely, making yoga prayer hands and generally acting as if they gave two shits about all those dead people.

My talk was supposed to be right after the keynote, in the same room, and NO ONE STAYED. Truly, I’d been dreading the dog-and-pony show, but the crowd disappeared like smoke, off to twiddle their chakras or call forth their inner shamans. Nobody wanted to talk about loss, especially the losses of other people. The quilt was just an colorful backdrop for their navel-gazery.

We spent the rest of the weekend going to seminars (Coyote as trickster! Andean panflute hoedown! Zen Egostroking!) and it never got any better. These were wealthy white people, disaffected Christians and Jews who just weren’t moved enough by their own traditions. Too boring! Too confining! Too whitebread-and-mayonnaise! So they acted like spiritual starlings, nabbing shiny bits and rituals from every theology, a sort of roll-your-own approach to creed and credo. How colorful their beliefs! How large their spirit! How fat their bank accounts, with their silver and turquoise adornments and their second homes in Sedona!

These are exactly the people who do past-life regressions and discover they were once EGYPTIAN ROYALTY. No one was ever a slave.

7-9. Theravada Buddhism (68%), Mahayana Buddhism (65%), Taoism (62%)
Zen and the art of quieting the monkey mind—sounds petty good, right? I’m drawn to these religions, or more specifically, to the practice of these religions. They feel pleasantly diffused; almost a secular way of being spiritual. It’s like yoga or vegetables, a sneakily spiritual way to feel better, body and soul.

10. Nontheist (60%)
I addressed this a bit back in July, but hey, it’s a blog, there’s always more to say.

I saw Religulous a couple months ago, and it had some pretty funny moments. The best one was after the film was done and the lights were coming up. “That wasn’t very…humorous,” the girl behind us told her date. I think they were expecting Borat and got Slick Uncle Phil’s Traveling Take-Your-Medicine Show instead.

My date probably had a different take—he’s a big “A” Atheist, where I’m a small “a” agnostic with some vague pantheistic impulses—but for as much as I enjoyed the film, I think Maher was so eager to prove that religion is just dangerous fairy tales that he cracked wise without catching this essential wisdom: We’re built to believe in something. Even if it’s just believing in not believing. Stories are important; narrative is an evolutionary advantage, not just the club that a bunch of hayseeds with malfunctions in their logic board use to pound the populace into submission. Although there is PLENTY of that, God or She-ra or Almighty Oak Tree knows.

The Final Word for Now: 
Wherein The Subtle Rudder Communes with Lutherans
Speaking of the Christian tradition (as we were many paragraphs above—way to hang in there, reader!), I drove to a funeral in Grand Island a few weeks ago. GI is our third largest city, except on football Saturdays, when Memorial Stadium fills with the Husker faithful, bumping the third city to fourth for the duration of the game. The N is for Knowledge. (An old joke that sounds better than it reads, but you get my meaning.)

The church was rafter-packed: my friends’ mom was a devoted churchwoman, and the congregation really turned out (although apparently it was Casual Tuesday for Lutherans). I was late, so I missed all the personal stuff with the family, but I was just in time for the sermon, delivered by an enthusiastically tongue-tied pastor who was brand new to the congregation. And I guess if you’re called, you serve, even if public speaking isn’t really your gig. That’s the real America. Who can trust charisma? No need to electrify! Make some room for those Joe the Pastors who want to spread the word, even if they can’t read said word aloud, stumbling through scripture like some dumb-tongued jock struggles with Shakespeare in English class.

He did let us know that there would be “a great, amazing party in the sky when Jesus comes back.” (Rager at God’s Crib! Awesome!) “I can’t wait to eat his cookies,” the pastor continued, and doesn’t that sound like code for something else? Is this the Lutheran version of the 40 virgins? But then I realized, no, we’re in the Heartland of America. Cookies are plenty of sin for the likes of us.

And below the sorrow of that day, I also felt like a big, judgy fraud, there in my pew, surrounded by willing Christians wearing fleece. And I feel the same way right now, just vile with snark as I type this out. I mean, who am I to say? I can’t even rub two beliefs together to create a spiritual spark. Part of me wishes I could engage with my heart and not just my brain, that I could find the faith I’d need to believe. Maybe that would make everything easier, make me more reliably joyful? But its seems my path to consider the void, to waver between the numinous and the nothing-at-all.

I’m pretty sure I went home that night and watched a DVD by myself, just glad for the warmth of my dogs under the covers.

Quiz via, images via, via, and from the cool-images-I-found-before-I-started-blogging folder. So sorry not to offer proper credit. I’m a jerk.

Tags: belief, lutherans, missouri synod, neo-pagans, new age, protestants, quakers, religion, unitarian universalists

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 6:35 pm and is filed under My confessional phase, Odd passions, Rants & politics, Words. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.